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More companies are getting into digital marketing nowadays, as it’s the best way to appeal to a more extensive audience base, including the general public. The problem with digital marketing is that the process of doing even one thing can take a considerable amount of time, money, and effort before you see results.

For small businesses that are eager to grow in the market they are in, content marketing and link building are their best options. The problem is that most small businesses only have enough resources to launch one type of campaign at a time, unlike larger corporations that can do many things simultaneously. Therefore, if you’re having a hard time choosing between the two campaigns, we’re here to help you make a better decision!

That said, here’s a guide on how to choose the best option for your company:

Link building VS. Content Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Link building is a process of getting more backlinks to your site, which helps improve inbounding traffic and brand credibility. When your links appear on an authoritative site, the credibility of your brand is enhanced, making it more trustworthy and interesting in the process. Think of it as a shoutout on Twitter. If you get a name-dropped by a celebrity, your brand will immediately become more famous.

Content marketing, on the other hand, focuses on establishing yourself as a prominent figure in your industry. It also helps drive traffic to your site, but in a different way than backlinks. The goal of content marketing is to educate readers on your industry and keep them entertained at the same time.

One benefit these two marketing options have in common is that they can help boost your search engine optimization (SEO), which means that your site will rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) on the associated keywords. While this may be a benefit you can expect, you have to keep in mind that how you achieve it is drastically different. When it comes to link building, you will have to contact other websites to see if you can cut a deal with them to have your links on their site. With content marketing, you will need to learn how to produce content and advertise it to reach as many people as possible.

How to Identify Which Type of Marketing Strategy You Need in Three Steps:

The Goals of Your Company

The first thing you need to think about is the goal of your brand. If you already have a content page that you want to drive more traffic to, then link building is your best option. On the other hand, if you don’t have any interesting features that will draw people to your site, you may need to focus on content marketing.

The Time Table of Your Marketing Plan

Link building is a slow process, but the payoff is usually continuous. You can expect to get more traffic to your site and as your links appear on more sites, that number will continue to increase. With content marketing, it’s all about the schedule, as you need to make sure that you post something according to the time table to keep a steady stream of traffic.

The Expertise of Your Team

Lastly, if you have a team of professional content creators at your disposal, then it’s usually a better idea to launch a content marketing campaign. It takes experience and understanding to write good content. Link building, on the other hand, is more about networking, as you will need to talk to different administrators to see what you need to do to get your link on their sites.

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Leeds, get in touch with us today! We’re happy to help.

So you’ve followed all the basic guidelines of search engine optimization. You’ve optimized your website and landing page, you’ve identified your ideal clients and created content targetted to them, you’ve made sure Google can trust and index your website. You reached the first page on the search engine. However, you still can’t rank any higher and can’t get additional traffic. Why?

As effective as SEO can be in helping you rank on search engines and generating traffic to your website, it still has its limitations. SEO and its corresponding process are not that simple, although that’s what it seems at first glance.

When you’ve followed the SEO process and executed it properly, you still have work to do to increase your traffic, which is focusing on the market itself. Here’s what you need to do:

Look at neighbouring territories

When you already have an established brand, an authoritative domain, and a great website, you can further increase your traffic by leveraging uncompetitive businesses that are in the same niche as you.

Identify products and services related to your business, do keyword research, and find the pages that ranking for those terms. Evaluate their landing page, domain authority, branded search volume, and SEO strategies, and think about how to improve your site. Start small and see if your effort will gain traction before extending it. Remember that you are already an established brand, so expanding to related products will enable you to reach more people and get ahead of smaller brands in those areas.

Create pages that can accommodate untapped opportunities

Some people have insufficient knowledge about a product or service or may be intimidated by them, which is why they don’t make a purchase. They are potential customers you can target by creating a page that can accommodate their hesitations and concerns. Your pages should not outrightly push the products and services to them. Instead, you provide them with comparisons and information that will guide and enable them to make confident decisions to purchase.

Improve your outreach

You have two groups of the interested audience. There are those who are not well-versed about your products and services, and those enthusiasts who already know but are keeping themselves updated. Your content must then be able to meet both their needs. Also, you can tap the help of the enthusiasts by asking them to review your products and services through videos and articles. Share these videos and articles on your social media pages.

To wrap up

SEO is an effective marketing tool that will help you rank high on search engines. However, your efforts must not stop there. To draw more traffic to your site, you must go the extra mile.

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Leeds, get in touch with us today! We’re happy to help.

Email marketing, without a doubt, is one of the most effective online marketing methods known today. If you’re familiar with email marketing and can generate a campaign to achieve a killer ROI, then you need to know that this strategy can be improved further. However, to do this, you’ll also need to be familiar with another popular online marketing method, which is PPC, or Google Ads in particular.

By combining PPC with your killer email marketing strategy, you’ll be able to improve the results considerably. In this article, we’ll show you exactly how.

Email Marketing and PPC

If you don’t already know, email marketing is the most effective online marketing tactic. This method is more effective than Facebook or Twitter. It is so effective that most, if not all, online marketing gurus suggest or even recommend email marketing to be one of the pillars of any online marketer’s campaigns.

In terms of brand awareness, Google Ads takes on a major role for any online marketer. Google Ads is known to improve brand awareness by as much as 80%. In fact, according to Google, most businesses make an average of $1 for every $2 spent on a Google Ad campaign.

Many online marketers already take advantage of one or both methods. They make full use of email marketing and may have a PPC campaign as well. However, not all of them know that by integrating or combining these two highly effective methods, a marketer can boost his or her email marketing campaign.

The Key to Email Marketing

If you’ve had any success at email marketing, you’ll know that the secret to this method is a highly compelling subject line. At least 50% of recipients open their email by how compelling the subject line was. Therefore, the more people who open your email, the higher your chances of that email being read, and people buying your product.

The question is, how do you create a compelling subject line?

If you guessed Google Ads PPC, then you’re correct, and here’s why.

About PPC Campaigns

Most people think of PPC campaigns in terms of generating revenue or improving brand awareness. While ads generally do both, there is one thing that many marketers often fail to notice. Google Ads are an excellent method to find out the best words or combination of words that not only draw attention but also encourage a person to click on the ad and eventually make a purchase.

To find out which of your ads will have the most effect for your email marketing campaigns, create two ads, and have them run for a couple of weeks. Remember that each ad must have the elements of FOMO (fear of missing out). These can be words like “urgent,” or “limited offer.”

After a couple of weeks, you’ll likely be able to determine which of your campaigns was the most effective.

If an ad campaign is effective, then the chances that a similar campaign in an email marketing format will also be highly effective as well.

Other Strategies to Increase Results in an Ad Campaign

Asides from FOMO, a few different strategies that you might want to tap into are to identify and target the audiences’ pain points. As you know, the majority or at least 70% of those who proceed to check out, fail to complete the purchase. However, by retargeting these people, there is a good chance that one in four will complete the purchase if they are retargeted with an effective email marketing strategy.

So, if you’re seeking for a highly effective method to boost your email marketing campaign, develop it by testing the most effective PPC ad and applying the same strategy on your email marketing.

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Leeds, get in touch with us today! We’re happy to help.

The rapid rise and popularity of the internet and the invention of several online marketing tools and techniques should have made marketing more efficient. However, many businesses still fall for the mistake of separating and running pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) as if one was unrelated to the other.

Although PPC and SEO are two distinct online marketing strategies, as a whole, they work and should work to complement each other. Thus, by synchronizing SEO and PPC, both approaches can enhance the overall results of your brand and sales for less effort. However, how to go about syncing SEO and PPC campaigns?

Working on shared data and target audiences

First, recognize that you are employing PPC and SEO to have all your online marketing bases covered. However, is there a big difference in the target audiences that you have for each online marketing strategy?

If you think about it, the audience for your overall online marketing efforts has a set of demographics and behaviour that does not change whether you use PPC or SEO. After all, it’s not your marketing strategy which dictates the behavior of your target market, but the other way around. Because the target audience of PPC and SEO is the same group, that means the separate teams or people who do your PPC and SEO are working with shared data, which is right under their noses.

For instance, PPC data can indicate which keywords are more likely to gain a user’s attention. Your SEO team can use that data to come up with keywords they can integrate into the content to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results, and it also works the other way around. If you notice that specific newsletters, white papers, blog posts, infographics, and demo requests have high demand, the PPC team can use the data to come up with ad designs and content relevant to your target audiences that would increase click-through-rates among them.

Collaboration between clients and agencies

Aside from internal input and cross-department collaboration within your agency, you also need to work with your clients to synchronize your PPC and SEO efforts. This also applies for businesses which have no online marketing teams and outsource the effort to agencies. An agency should regularly consult with the client to know what they need, and for both parties to understand what the markets need, to fine-tune their PPC and SEO undertaking and make these tasks complement each other. That way, clients and agencies save time and reap the rewards for less effort.

The market is in flux, which means needs and demographics change. An agency should take the initiative to explain to the client how PPC and SEO would be coordinated to adjust to the changes and still produce the desired results. On the other hand, clients are encouraged to share their insights and inputs to help create a strategy that fits their target objectives. Discuss your strategies and thoughts with each other and see how you can come up with a coordinated PPC and SEO campaign to bring the dollars in from clicks sourced from paid searches and organic landings.

As you can see, communication between parties is essential. More than just a client-agent relationship, both parties are in a partnership, and collaboration is what partners do to achieve their goals. Build trust, assess strengths and weaknesses, and move your PPC and SEO efforts forward for great success!

Conclusion

Remember, it’s not a choice between SEO and PPC. Instead, what you need is to communicate and collaborate, whether it’s between separate SEO and PPC teams or between agencies and clients. Achieve better outcomes when you synchronize SEO and PPC.

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Leeds, get in touch with us today! We’re happy to help.

When your business has a storefront, the most important thing you need to worry about is getting more customers. With the advent of social media, it’s much easier for a physical store to promote itself, but that doesn’t mean that everything you post on your timeline will convert those who see your posts into real paying customers. You need to cater to the specific demands of the audience and find a way to entice them to come to your shop, whether through promotion, hype, or advertisements in general.

If you’re looking for some tips on how to use social media marketing to get more customers, here are some tips for you:

Which Platform Should You Use?

Each social media platform has its perks and pitfalls, which means that you need to make sure that you choose the best one. Go with a platform that has what you’re looking for. Listed below are the different social media platforms that you can use to bring more people to your storefront:

Facebook

You can say what you want about Facebook, like how it’s dying, but the truth is it’s still one of the most dominant forces in the digital marketing industry. There are still over two billion active accounts on Facebook every month, and the traffic alone is enough of a reason for you to think about using it as a marketing platform. Furthermore, Facebook is specifically designed to cater to businesses, as evident in tools such as Facebook Business Page, sophisticated ads settings, and real-time analytics tools.

You can create a Facebook page and advertise it by creating an event, running ads, or promoting your posts to get people to pay attention to your shop.

In summary, Facebook can help you with:

Generating authenticity and brand awareness

Generating leads

Driving traffic

Providing customer service

Creating a buzz around your brand

Twitter

Twitter is among the best platforms at generating hype and buzz around your brand, as it allows your brand to feel more relatable and approachable. Tweets are really easy to send out and fans can interact directly with your brand through the platform. Brands such as Wendy’s have mastered the use of Twitter, which has led them to find significant success on the platform. They often tweet fun messages or lighthearted jabs at their competitors. Such posts create a cute sort of beef between the brands, which makes people feel engaged and entertained.

You can try to replicate their gameplan or come up with a completely different way to appeal to the market. Twitter still remains the Wild West of Digital marketing, as there isn’t an “established” way to promote your brand on the platform, so it allows you to be as experimental as you want.

In summary, Twitter can help you with:

Creating a buzz around your brand

Enhancing brand awareness

Promoting events and products

Creative expression

Instagram

If you’re looking to promote your product or storefront, no platform in the world is as powerful as Instagram. Since everything on Instagram is driven by visual content, it provides an excellent opportunity for a brand to show the audience what you have to offer. For example, if you run a restaurant, you can display the food you serve on your Instagram page and tell audiences that certain dishes are only available for a limited time.

You can tell the story of your brand through your Instagram page, as they will get to see the best sides of it. Additionally, the Story feature is also a great marketing tool, as it can be used to generate the engagement you’re looking for. For example, you can set up a poll, questionnaire, or a Q&A session through the story feature. This will make people want to be a part of what you’re doing on Instagram, which will make them want to come to your physical store.

In summary, Instagram can help you with:

Generating engagement

Presenting visual elements of your brand

Promoting your event

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Leeds, get in touch with us today! We’re happy to help.

Many people think that SEO is all about content strategy and on-page optimization. This leaves out one integral part of the whole process—link building. Link building is a way to help the crawling algorithm to understand what your site does and how credible it is, as it will give your site a credit score based on where your link is found. Think of it as a retweet from a celebrity. When a small brand gets mentioned by a bigger name, they will immediately become more famous.

If you haven’t included link building in your overall SEO plan, here are three reasons why you should do so sooner rather than later:

// It gives you the opportunity to build relationships To start your link building process, you need to reach out to different websites and talk to them about collaborating. In a way, it’s a form of networking, as you will come in contact with various admins from numerous sites that do different things. You will get to know a lot of people who can help you with your immediate and future projects and ensure that you always have a connection with them.

// It acts as referrals for your business The inbounding links to your website are a gateway for people to connect with your business. By having your links posted in other places, you’re directing more traffic towards your business and ensuring that you have more conversions.

// It helps you build your brand Another reason why you should invest some time in doing link building is that it helps emphasize your brand and grow your authority in the industry. When people see your brand name popping up on websites they visit frequently, it’s more likely that they will recognize your brand and services.

How to Make a Link Building Campaign More Effective Now that you understand why link building is such a crucial part of any SEO campaign, let’s move on to how you can craft your own backlink strategy. Listed below are three essential tips that you have to keep in mind when designing a backlink campaign:

1. Add all the required features to your landing pages People need to have a reason to interact with your link, so if your page doesn’t fulfil their expectations or meet their needs, chances are your backlinks won’t do so well. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is make sure that your linked pages have the content or features that people need. For example, if you post a backlink to your landscape service and the landing page doesn’t have any information about the pricing, tools, or services you can offer, people won’t stick around for very long. You need to understand what people expect to see from your links and have those sorted out first.

2. Get a headstart from your known contacts Starting an extensive backlink network can be difficult, especially when you have to do everything from scratch. If possible, it’s best that you get a headstart from your friends and family who may be running a blog or a web board, as that will help make everything run more smoothly.

3. Make sure your website can handle the increased traffic Lastly, you have to keep in mind that backlinks can also help with your SEO campaign, but it won’t do you much good if your other SEO elements are sub-par. For this reason, you need to make sure that your page can handle the increased traffic and interactions, which is why web optimization is such an integral part of the overall process. If your website has a slow load time and its design doesn’t feel user-friendly, people won’t want to use your site, which will then increase the bounce rate.

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Leeds, get in touch with us today! We’re happy to help.

Search engine companies, especially Google, have been introducing updates that help create better online search experience for users. These updates do not only aim to provide users with enjoyable and productive online search experience but also to accommodate and support new technologies and applications. These include mobile site adaptation and voice search technology.

The Widening Use of Voice Search

It is reported that voice search has already taken up a good percentage of the total search numbers all around the world. This can be attributed to the widening acceptance and usage of voice search apps and devices, such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa. Indeed, voice search comes in handy in various ways.

Voice Search and SEO: What Happens Now?

Now that voice search continues to dominate a good portion of the total Web searches, you might wonder how it affects your website’s rankings. How do you optimize your website better to adapt to this new trend?

Indeed, it is very important that you start optimizing your website to adapt to the rise of voice search. Looking at how things are going, it seems that voice search is here to stay. For this reason, you’re better off beginning to optimize for voice search now!

How Would You Keep Up With the Voice Search Trend Voice search results still largely depend on keywords, so there’s no need to panic. However, you can make sure that your website ranks whenever a user voice-searches using your keywords. Here’s what you can do:

Prioritize localizing SEO optimization – Almost every business nowadays has a website or at least a social media account or page. If you’re running a local business or website, then you should focus your SEO efforts on local SEO. Those who use voice search are most likely looking for services, businesses, or products available near them. You want your business or website to be among the first ones presented to them when they do a voice search. Make sure you perform proper geo-tagging both on your website and social media accounts. You should also begin using Google My Business and make the most of it.

Optimize and design for mobile search – Since voice searches are typically conducted through mobile devices, your website should also be designed and optimized for mobile use. You need to have either a responsive or adaptive website that can be viewed regardless of what device is used. You should also make sure that page loading speed is great, as a slow website won’t appeal to users.

Do not forget other SEO factors – Of course, you can’t forget about other factors, including the creation of high-quality and relevant content. Remember to always provide your audience with value, regardless whether they stumble upon your website through voice search or traditional search. Make sure your keywords are always updated and that you always provide fresh content related to those keywords.

The internet and search engines keep evolving. Therefore, you should always be prepared to keep up with the changes. Optimizing your website is a continuous learning and improvement process, so settle in and enjoy the ride!

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Leeds, get in touch with us today! We’re happy to help.

With all the new Facebook features coming out seemingly on a daily basis, Facebook is quickly becoming an all-encompassing utility that has outgrown its original social media conception. In the beginning, Facebook was a simple tool to connect with friends and family and share your world with others – It is now a complex platform that is used for so much more including marketing, and more recently, interacting with local businesses. October 2016 brought a welcomed selection of additions to the ever-expanding range of Facebook Utilities – What do these additions offer and how can they change the way you conduct business?

What changes have been implemented?

Recommendations – What do you do if you want to find a quality hairdresser in your local area? You can now use Facebook to do so! The recommendations feature allows you to request information from your contacts pertaining to local businesses. For example, you could ask “I need my car servicing – Which garages are reliable?” this would appear on your timeline and your friends can respond by tagging local businesses in the comments!

Events –Maybe you want to check out what events are happening in your local area? Traditionally you might have to check the newspaper – Facebook can now facilitate this instead, and you can even use the platform to purchase tickets! Organisations and individuals can create events and invite their followers – if your friends are attending these events, it will display in your events tab.

Business interactions – The final, and possibly most exciting addition is the new business features. Facebook now facilitates the following for businesses – Ordering food, requesting appointments, and requesting quotes! Yes, that’s right; you can now order a Kebab on Facebook or book that overdue haircut from your smartphone! These new Facebook features use a combination of messenger and the Facebook platform to provide interactions between a business and its customers.

How can these changes impact your life and business?

Convenience is the key point to take away from this set of exciting new additions. These new Facebook features are effectively making your life easier and giving you access to a whole host of new information and possibilities.

For businesses, the potential to increase your exposure and sales is great – This provides another avenue of business and another way that potential customer can interact with your organisation. Consider this – How many people use Facebook on a daily basis? The numbers are staggering and by implementing things like “Request a quote” buttons, the business process becomes so much easier and accessible.

Customers will be able to directly interact with your business with minimal effort. Furthermore, Facebook is accessible 24/7, therefore, these new features are not constrained by your business opening hours – A customer could request a quote at 9 pm in the evening for example, and you could simply access your page via your smartphone or tablet and respond to the quote promptly!

For small companies, Facebook will now serve as a viable form of advertisement and a platform from which they can conduct their business. With careful planning, and optimising the use the quote and appointment features, businesses can dominate the local market and greatly increase their potential customer base.

Noisybird are social media and content marketing experts and are dedicated to helping you get heard online. If you would like to discuss this article or any of our services in greater detail then please feel free to get in touch. Give us a call on 0113 314 1979 or drop us an email at hello@noisybird.co.uk.

Creating Facebook Custom Audiences

Advertising in the modern world has changed drastically – TV, Radio and billboard are no longer the primary means of marketing and social media has taken their place as the new solution. Millions of people have instant access to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, therefore it stands to reason that advertising on these platforms provides a huge potential customer base for those willing to invest.

Facebook has implemented paid advertisements for some time, and this methodology is continually evolving in its complexity – This business has a vast amount of data and statistics available that they can use to customise adverts and provide a targeted service that is beneficial for both the consumer and supplier. A new development that has arisen in the ability to create a “Custom Audience” – Read on to find out exactly what this means!

What is a custom audience?

A custom audience on Facebook is a captive group of individuals and organisations that already have an affiliation with your business. These people could have liked your Facebook page or shared one of your articles; they could be suppliers, past customers or even business partners. Basically, anyone that has shown an amount of interest in what you have to offer.

Facebook allows you to target this demographic of people and create customised audience groups – You can then use these groups to create specific advertising campaigns and hopefully increase your engagement and revenue as a result.

What is the benefit of this type of advertising?

Advertising often falls short due to its lack of reach and resonance – How many times have you noticed an advert on Facebook and dismissed it immediately as it has no relevance to you whatsoever? Generic advertising that isn’t suited to a particular customer base or demographic will often have poor results.

This is why custom audiences and targeted advertising are so worthwhile. A custom audience lets you appeal to a group of people that you know has an interest in your business! They have already taken the first step, therefore a custom audience can simply push them in the right direction and prompt further action.

How do I create a custom audience in Facebook?

If you have a Facebook page created, you must take the following steps:

You can then select how you want your audience populated i.e. how you want Facebook to select which users are included within the group – Possible methods include website traffic, app activity, engagement on Facebook and customer files. By selecting the Facebook option you can then choose what type of engagement you want to use including video, lead ad, canvas and page (i.e. users that have watched a video you posted or viewed a canvas you created). The “page” option allows you to create a custom audience based on users that have interacted with your Facebook page in some vicinity.

From there you can then choose various parameters such as what timeframe the interaction should be i.e. the last 30 days, and how specific the interaction should be i.e. everyone who has viewed your page, or everyone who has sent a message to your page for example – The level of customization is fantastic!

Once you have created your audience, you can then use it to create advertising campaigns etc. This new feature truly opens up a whole new avenue of possibility for Facebook advertisements – targeted adverts using customised audiences can help greatly to improve your exposure and lead generation.

Noisybird are social media and content marketing experts and are dedicated to helping you get heard online. If you would like to discuss this article or any of our services in greater detail then please feel free to get in touch. Give us a call on 0113 314 1979 or drop us an email at hello@noisybird.co.uk.

Slow page loading speed. It’s the age-old problem; you click on a website but then you wait and wait and wait. How frustrating is that?

Well, the facts show that if you have to wait more than just 3 seconds then there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll click away from the website and go find a faster one. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make sure that your website loads super fast. Check out the excellent infographic below which looks at 12 case studies to show how page load speed really affects conversion rates.

If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you could be losing nearly half of your visitors, according to data from Akamai. It’s pretty simple: the faster the speed of your website, the happier your visitors will be. Optimising page load time leads to noticeable improvements in customer experience, conversion rates, and ultimately, your sales revenue. In fact, reducing your website‘s page load time can have a surprisingly positive impact on your entire marketing and sales pipelines. —blog.hubspot.com